In online gaming, game hosting services and game developers have created a number of ways to track and personalize the online gaming experience. One drawback of existing systems is that many of the features have grown up independent of each other. Games send blobs of data about gamers back and forth to a central service, but the service has no way to understand and aggregate the data outside of the game context. Games can host their own Websites, but the data displayed there is not universally accessible to other games.
In a sense, then, the service and games offer two parallel communities that offer great—but separated—resources for gamers. First, in the game community, while playing a game, the gamer can see the community of others who play the specific game, the leaderboards for that game, and his personal achievements in that game. A game can tell a gamer, from the Service data, if a Friend is online, but it can't tell the gamer what, exactly that Friend is doing on the Service or when he will be available.
Second, in the service community, the service knows a gamer player's history, all of the games he's played, the amount of time he spends online, the size of his Friends list and all of the games that Friends have played or are playing, the Friends invites sent and received, the Messages sent and received, and all of the Feedback the gamer has given and received.
Systems have tried to leverage these on-line communities to match various players to allow them to play multi-player games. Nevertheless, in general such systems, which typically emphasize skill or experience in a single game or small family of games, do not group players who are likely to enjoy shared interaction based on social and/or personal considerations. That's because these social factors, which depend on large aggregates of data across many game types and session, cannot easily be taken into account when matching players for a single game. Matchmaking systems in the gaming world do not produce close relationships between individual players.
There is a need for a matchmaking service that selects matches based on personal/social characteristics that emerge from cross-game data collection. Moreover, such systems should take into account direct feedback from other players about positive and negative experiences with a particular player and expectations about appropriate conduct and type of game being played before a player joins the game session. Such a system, it is believed, will result in deeper inter-personal relationships and more enjoyable game play, because the frequency and quality of interaction with suitable players is increased over time as a player's network of familiar players grows.